A harmless home is a home that makes sensible choices in the materials and energy that it consumes. It is also careful about the materials it discards or expels into its surrounding.

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To answer that you need to become aware of all the materials that come in – air, water, soil, fabric, cleaning agents, foods, products, etc and look at what goes out.

A simple example – you bring in cleaning material to clean your clothes. This material comes in the form of cake, powder and liquid. You spend some money every month on this material in the belief that it will keep your home hygienic and safe. You do not know that most of this material has components that are toxic and harmful to you, your children, and your home.

They also harm the environment when they leave through the waste water of your home and through your waste bag.

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This is a tough one, but it is what we must all concentrate on and uncover relentlessly. We are wary of calling all man made material toxic, but a lot of it is. And it’s impossible to reverse a lot of our production and material decisions. We just have to find new ways forward.

To help us make a decision on what to recommend to our customers, we check to see if our solution/recommendation is definitely less harmful than the current option they are using. Like our soap nut product – is definitely less harmful on all counts than the chemical detergents. It also has a plus factor built in – you can plant a soapnut tree. And trees are one of the best antidotes to arresting climate change.

So we have begun work on finding more such solutions.

We also find that less harmful is not necessarily more convenient or cheaper, so that is our design challenge. How can we make less harmful, easy to use and perhaps cheaper.
Another bit of experience – most harmful is usually the cheapest. Harmful masquerading as cool and effective and scientific can be expensive on your pocket, your health and the environment. It's the area under least scrutiny and no one has time to figure out the pros and cons of products or materials like those.

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An ideal situation would be to have homes that are less toxic, more self-healing, safe and which do not contaminate their surroundings.

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Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Begin with reducing what you buy, reusing and recycling. If more and more people stop buying soft drinks or bottled water, the companies who make these will go out of business. So stop buying things that are toxic. Tell your friends and family to stop buying too.

Learn: You have to learn more about the "convenience" industry. The products off the shelves all have a lot of chemicals to help them stay so long. Which chapatti that you make at home will stay for a week? So you have to learn and ask and talk to others who have begun questioning.

Reflect: See the "Story of Stuff" film - http://www.storyofstuff.com/ - and reflect on your own belief systems on issues like local produce, convenience, quality of life, taste, health, responsible buying, hygiene, waste etc.

Put Pressure: You also have to push for more legislation that ensures adherence to ecological practices. Join an advocacy group and put pressure on manufacturers to create safer products. You will be surprised how many educated managers and policy makers actually disregard safety in the face of profits.

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Daily Dump is interested in working in areas where you can reduce the “harm” in your home in simple, straightforward and scientific ways. This is no nostalgic, back to “the good old days” philosophy.
It began with creating a product to enable a home to manage their organic waste at source while turning it into great raw material – compost. This reduced the amount of waste each home threw out into the street or the landfill.
Keeping organic waste out of landfills reduces the amount of methane (a green house gas) produced.
Now it is exploring ways to reduce the environmental impact of each home in different areas.

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